From the folk tales of ETA Hoffman and Alexandre Dumas to Tchaikovsky’s ballet and beyond, translater Sarah Ardizzone traces the evolution of one of our best-loved Christmas stories
Thu 24 Dec 2015 12.00 EST Last modified on Wed 20 Sep 2017 06.17 EDT
With its toy soldiers and its sugarplum fairy who come alive on Christmas eve, Tchaikovsky’s ballet of The Nutcracker has come to sum up the magic of the festive season. But there is a darker history to the story, and the French writer Alexandre Dumas was just one of the storytellers who was entranced by it. This is the title plate to his L’Histoire d’un Caisse-Noisette (The History of a Nutcracker), published in 1844. It was illustrated by Bertall when he was just 24 years old.
We can trace accounts of wooden nutcrackers springing to life back to the folk tales of Bohemia, Poland and Muscovy. It was on this folklore that ETA Hoffman drew in his Nutcracker and Mouse King, a macabre exploration of wide-eyed childlike imagination pitted against the bourgeois values of 19th-century Bavaria, which reshaped the tale.
The highest ranking European general of all time of African descent, General Dumas was born to a former slave and a French nobleman on the island of Sainte Dominigue (present day Haiti). Alexandre Dumas was only four when his father died in 1806, but the young boy grew up hearing about his extraordinary military career during the French Revolutionary Wars. These tales of derring-do and extreme exploits in battle helped shape his writerly imagination, and explain why The Battle (in The History of A Nutcracker) is so vivid – despite being played out by tin soldiers and assorted toys.
Dumas’s wife, the actress (born Marguerite-Josephine Ferrand) is credited with translating Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King from German into French. Dumas himself then adapted it, introducing a framing device and restoring the tale to its oral storytelling tradition. Our narrator is tethered to a chair in the boudoir of a French children’s party and the society brats refuse to untether him until he has told them a gripping story. Enter Hoffman’s Nutcracker, with exceptionally high stakes: it is as imperative for Dumas’s narrator to hold his audience’s attention as for Scheherazade.
Photograph: Photograph of Alexander Dumas père (1802-1870) by Nadar
Dumas’ version is famously more saccharine than Hoffman’s lugubrious tale, and when Tchaikovsky was commissioned to compose the score for a libretto by Marius Petipa, he was unhappy that Petipa had adapted directly from Dumas. The resulting two-act ballet premiered in December 1892, to mixed reviews. It wasn’t until 1934 that a complete performance reached England, and the ballet wasn’t staged in its entirety in the US until Christmas Eve 1944. That production, by the San Francisco Ballet, met with such acclaim that The Nutcracker has been in production in San Francisco every Christmas since.
Photograph: Portrait of Piotr Illych Tchaikovsky by Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov
A Nursemaid Guarding Princess Pirlipata – Bertall’s original French illustrations were also used in Chapman and Hall’s 1847 edition of The History of A Nutcracker by Alexandre Dumas held in the Blythe House, Renier Collection.
Godfather Drosselmayer watching over Fritz and Marie – re-used in the first English edition (1847). The illustrations are as shrill, disturbing and iconic as those of his exact British contemporary, John Tenniel, for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
The Dodo picture from Alice in Wonderland – Just as there are resonances between Bertall and Tenniel’s visual worlds (both were also caricaturists), so Dumas’s playfulness with perspective seems to anticipate Alice’s famous capacity to shrink and elongate: for Marie is human-sized, yet through the back of an old wardrobe she enters a world filled with nutcracker-sized people.
If the translation of the 1847 Chapman & Hall edition goes unattributed, Vizetelly Brothers & Co. were acknowledged as the printers and engravers. This is doubly interesting. Firstly, since Henry Vizetelly became a prominent and daring publisher of translated works from French and Russian, ultimately to his cost (he was imprisoned in 1889 for obscene libel after translating Emile Zola’s La Terre). Secondly, because Henry Vizetelly actively contributed to the Victorian confection of a middle-class Christmas, which was being commercialized at around the time Dumas was adapting his Nutcracker.
Preserved in our collective false memory as a candied fruit, and now often thought of only in the context of the Sugar Plum Fairy and her dance, the dragée (the name now given to sugared almonds offered to guests at weddings and baptisms) in fact refers to the sugar-coating process which created the hard sweet known as the sugar plum.
What entices me to Dumas’ version, and what is so appealing in that first English translation, is that the tale has been restored to its oral story-telling tradition. As a 21st century translator, I took this to mean that my job was about ‘voicing’ the words, making them feel as if they were being read out loud – this has been my Plimsoll line, rather than anguishing about period synonyms (although, in the main, I have tried to use contemporaneous vocabulary). The Story of a Nutcracker (Vintage Classics) is translated by Sarah Ardizzone with cover illustration by Kitty Arden.
